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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"increase in the probability of realism (pessimism)"

Realism and pessimism being synonymous now. Perhaps this was written by an optimist.

That's not what it means. This is a style of writing common in some academic fields where when they measure multiple qualities, they'll present them in the abstract next to each other in parentheses rather than repeat full sentences.

You should read "All else being equal, those highest on cognitive ability experience a 22% (53.2%) increase in the probability of realism (pessimism)" as as a 22% increase in realism and a 53.2% increase in pessimism

Yes and a fellow English scholar openly laughed in the face of our PhD highly credentialed Professor because certain attempts to overly sophisticate or garnish banality isn’t a “style of writing” it’s a foul and wrong and do not do it.

She read the sentence including “…and the data crystallized to show..” and she couldn’t finish he was almost in the floor.

“DATA DOESN’T CRYSTALIZE! Ahahaha crystals crystalize!”

As an academic, I also don't write like that, but laughing at it sounds like the reaction of a jerk. Writing like that can come from cultural differences (in some cultures they really seem to love flourish) or from being a non-native English speaker and translating common idioms literally, it doesn't necessarily mean that the writer is clueless.

It seems surprising that the scholar's studies didn't cover the concept of metaphors.

I spotted that as well. But the rest of the study doesn’t mix them. They define realists as people who predicted their future finances correctly, optimists as people who missed (so eg said no change where the reality was their finances got worse) and pessimists as people who missed the other way.

So they define pessimists as people who did better than they expected?

I'm not convinced this means pessimists are smarter. Maybe it just means that smarter people are more likely to surprise themselves by how well they perform. If someone expects great outcomes, it doesn't make them pessimists if they do even better than that. Oxford's first definition of "pessimist" is "a person who tends to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen," which is not at all what the study looks at.

A pessimist is a well informed optimist

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